


American Doll Posse

by Fahye



Category: Bad Blood - Taylor Swift (Music Video)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world’s not kind; that’s the first lesson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	American Doll Posse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littledust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

_Headmistress_

Once you look for them there are girls on every curb. The world’s not kind; that’s the first lesson. The second lesson is that nobody’s going to expect kindness from you, either, so you might as well line your palms with knives and your lips with teeth. 

All of them will ask her, at one point or another: _were you like us?_

Is that why?

The why is less dramatic than that. She started out on the glittering rooftops of this city, promised the world, with money enough that she could pay ten people to paint one fingernail each, and each in a different shade of red. That much money seemed always to be waiting for an idea large enough for it: not the largest property or the rarest jewel or the most exclusive experience, but an _idea_. 

She likes to stand on the balcony looking out over the training rooms, feeling the chilly line of air that puffs against the back of her knees. There’s a leak in the metal panels that line the room but she refuses to let them find and repair it; it’s as good a reminder as any that she can build this stronghold, this haven, to be as fantastical as she wants, but the outside world won’t care. It will always find a way to breathe its influence in. She listens to the shouts that echo between plastic and spongy foam. This is a room full of girls who have stopped anxiously monitoring themselves, stopped caring about the ugliness of the noise that they make. It’s been a long, hard unlearning for them all. But the result is that when the outside world comes calling, they’ll know how to answer.

The third lesson is that kindness is its own weapon.

 

_Knockout_

When she wakes up, nearly blinded by the whiteness of the recovery room--no lights in her life have ever been that bright--Headmistress asks her if she knows how to fight. She says that she does. She thinks that she does. Her life has been a matter of taking hit after hit, and she’s still alive, so she must know something. 

Justice takes her into the ring and attacks her with a mercilessness that at first is a shock, given the warmth of the food in her stomach and the soft bed she slept in last night, but in the next instant it’s not a shock at all. She expects betrayal. She’s always on watch for it. She takes every hit, just as she's always done, blocking and twisting with all of her might.

Afterwards they tell her, _no: you don’t know how to fight. You know how to survive._

She heals. She learns to land blows of her own. She fights every girl who passes through the doors--some of whom leave again, when they’ve healed from their own visible or invisible wounds, but most of whom stay--and makes them prove that they deserve to be there. Some of them need to know that they can take a blow and keep on pulling themselves back up again; some of them have aggression to work out, and she’s the best sort of punching bag.

When she fights the sharp-eyed, suspicious thief, the girl dragged from the top of a wrecked car, she’s almost driven back by the anger and the familiar hollow gash of betrayal in her face. Even when the girl’s lovely skin is made whole, the damage is visible to anyone who knows how to look, and she’s a dervish of need. Revenge is a bright and coachable fire.

They circle one another in the ring. So far, they haven’t talked outside of it. But this is its own kind of conversation.

 

_Domino_

If she’d existed in any previous time, or in any other place, she’d be dead. That she knows.

In the accident she lost:  
\- her left leg, from just below the knee  
\- her right arm, from just above the elbow  
\- the sight in one eye  
\- her older sister

She likes being on her bike best of all, because there’s a port for her chrome-and-electric leg; she plugs herself into the pedal and suddenly the whole bike is an extension of her nervous system, leaning and steering in response to the slightest twitch of her will. 

It’s tricky at first, with no depth perception. But after a few months technology races ahead and they give her a new eye; this one sees in the dark. She flies down the grimy streets and through wrecked tunnels, and the wheels of her bike are a spinning blue blur like the tiny spark that’s visible in her pupil when she stares hard in the mirror.

She tells stories, in the evenings, when they’ve all put away their weapons and their armour and are just a group of young women learning to kick back against the world. There’s more laughter than you’d expect. There are people running their hands through one another’s hair, trying out styles that are less practical than a tight fighting braid. They know, better than any man ever could, that the way you look is an important part of reinvention. 

She tells stories and she’s a walking story herself. Her moral is this: you can come back from any loss, if you are prepared to adapt. You replace that phantom part of yourself with something stronger. You take the help that’s offered to you.

You can’t replace a sister as easily as an arm, but you can build yourself a new family.

 

_The Trinity_

In total, she has been (she is) (she will be) a neat hundred bodies. 

A group of them rescued her from the lab, and they were seriously underprepared. They'd heard the rumours about her, Experiment 67T, but they didn't know the truth. Later, Frostbyte would tell her that the storeroom looked like the stacks of a library, tall and white and cold, with the naked body of 01 suspended in the vat of gel in the centre of the room with her eyes open. Watching. 

Unsurprisingly, the mission went south. They hadn't planned to rescue a hundred girls, and back then they thought she _was_ a hundred different girls. Clones. True enough, in a sense.

They made it out of the burning building with a total of three models: 88, 89, 90.

So now she has six legs and thirty fingers and six eyes, which is less than she had before, but it doesn't matter, because what she does with those legs and fingers and eyes is entirely up to her. To a certain extent. They tried to teach her to fight, and it quickly became clear that each body exists in a different temporal space, her consciousness cleaved into past, present, future. She can force the difference down to a matter of microseconds, but it's still enough to be disastrous. Besides: as soon as they remove the helmets and her bodies are disconnected from one another, they all collapse like puppets whose strings were attacked with scissors, a clean slice, limbs tumbling to the floor. She doesn't mind that much. She's most useful at headquarters, plugged into the ever-growing mainframe where security feeds and information bursts and useful data of all kinds combine, coordinating missions from a distance.

When she bothers to think hard about it, she doesn't even know if she is these three bodies. Maybe she’s the white cables that join their brains; maybe _she_ is the computer where the input mingles and the decision comes out. 

Does it matter?

 

_Catastrophe_

You never think of yourself as holding enough mass to shatter glass, to send the metal frame of a car crumpling around you, until it happens. Until you wake up from it, broken in too many ways and too many places to count (although they _do_ count; the trio of girls behind their white visors, who are actually one girl, can recite her injuries down to the Latin names for every bone and vessel) and realise that in the end you were stronger than the steel, stronger than glass and gravity and the pair of dark eyes that held your gaze unflinchingly as you fell backwards into the night.

Like all of them, she had another name, once.

As she heals, and trains, and learns at the speed of honey to trust again, she waits for them to tell her: _let it go_. Before her heart was broken and came furiously back together, she would have seen the merit in brushing the past from the soles of your feet and moving on. This underground world of women seems built on such concepts: discard your name. Discard your pain. Take up whatever weapons are most useful to you, and build a new life.

But they don't say, _let it go_. They say, _we have your back_. 

Revenge is a fire and she lets it warm her.

She dyes her hair the colour of blood, and sharpens her eyeliner along with her knives.


End file.
